Shake Your Animal Booty With Addictive Disco Zoo

The folks behind the brilliant and sticky Tiny Death Star and Pocket Trains are back at it again, this time with another free-to-play title, Disco Zoo. This time, however, NimbleBit has the added talent of rock-star developer Owen Goss, a Canadian dude with a pedigree in gaming that reaches back to pre-iOS days (gasp).

Disco Zoo has the same Nimblebit retro bitizen look and feel, and the fun mechanics from Pocket Trains and Tiny Tower are out in force. You’ll take over running of the titular Zoo, adding animals and building habitats while earning in-game soft currency on a timed basis, as well as randomly on the zoo map screen.

The main part of the game involves rescuing animals from a variety of habitats–each requires the purchase of more and more expensive aircraft–and adding them to your zoo. The zoo animals will sleep after a time, which encourages you to keep checking back into the app to wake them up.

You’ll find animals on a grid screen by tapping on the little squares, revealing animals and coins beneath. Tap the right pattern for the animals hidden there, and you get to add them to your zoo, or level up the ones you already have there. It’s frightfully compelling.

You can throw a Disco Party, too, to keep the animals awake for longer and have them earn double the amount of income from zoo patrons during the party. When active, a cute little disco ball descends from the top of the screen, throwing the ubiquitous dance-party mirrored light reflections all over the place, and the animals, zoo patrons and construction workers (who build the habitats for you when you find new animals) will boogie down across all the screens. It’s adorable and it works.

There’s hard currency, too, which you can earn in game or purchase with real money, letting you build habitats faster, or earn new turns searching for animals.

If you’ve a hankering for building up a Disco Zoo, don’t wait and head over to the App Store to get your copy as a free universal app right now.